Walter Gropius belongs to the select group of architects that massively influenced the international development of modern architecture. With the Bauhaus in Dessau, Gropius created one of the most influential architecture and design schools of the 20th century. During the few years of its use as a school, until it was closed down by the Nazis in 1932, it had also become a center for the creative forces of its time. The rise to power of Hitler drove Gropius out of Germany. He eventually settled in Boston, where he taught at Harvard and MIT. Born and educated in Germany, Walter Gropius worked under the German architect Peter Behrens from 1907 untill 1910, his fellow employees at this time included Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. As the founding director of the Bauhaus, Gropius made inestimable contributions to his field, to the point that knowing his work is crucial to understanding Modernism. His early buildings, such as the Bauhaus Building, with it’s use of glass and industrial features, are still indispensable points of reference. The Bauhaus revolutionized art training by combining the teaching of the pure arts with the study of crafts. Gropius aimed to unite art with technology, and he educated a new generation of designers and architects to reject historical precedents and adopt the ideology of modern industry. For the Bauhaus, Gropius wrote the curriculum, designed the building, and he assembled its faculty: an extraordinary group that included Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Breuer.

Description: Hard bound first printing bound in yellow cloth with red lettering. No dust jacket. Text in German. 221 pages, profusely illustrated. #12 in the series -bauhausbucher. Very progressive architecture for the time, showing the most early ideas of modernism in architecture. The most sought after title in the series. Some wear and minor soiling to cloth boards. Interior clean and binding tight. RARE hardbound copy!.

Bookseller Inventory # 16908

$1650

Walter Gropius : Bauhaus Bauten Dessau
Gropius, Walter

Publisher: Albert Langen Verlag
Publication Date: 1930
Binding: Hard Cover
Book Condition:Good
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket
Edition: First Edition

· Category: Architecture, Featured Items ·

The Baron Von Ketteler was the German Ambassador to China in the late 1800’s, and was subsquently murdered during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. On on the 20th of June the conservative faction of the Imperial Court induced the Empress Dowager to declare war on the foreign powers in Beijing. Diplomats, foreign civilians, soldiers and some Chinese Christians retreated to the Legation Quarter where they held out for fifty-five days until the Eight-Nation Alliance brought 20,000 troops to their rescue. The Ketteler Monument was erected in everlasting commemoration of his name, and as an eternal token of the Emperor’s wrath, and as a warning to all!

Description: Original leather binding with gilt titles, raised bands & lovely marbled endpapers. Gold hand tooling to spine edge. Fold out engraved map frontispiece. Text in French. An anecdotal overview of China, Japan, Siam, Tonkin, Burma, and Laos by the French author Jean Castillon (1718-1799). OWNERSHIP BOOKPLATE FROM THE BARONESS MAUD “MATILDA” VON KETTELER affixed to front fixed endpage. Hinges tender but holding, wear to edges of boards with some loss of leather. Interior shows some minor foxing, otherwise very good.

Bookseller Inventory # 18350

SOLD

Anecdotes Chinoises
Castillon, Jean

Publisher: Chez Vincent, Paris
Publication Date: 1774
Binding: Hard Bound
Book Condition: Good
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket, As Issued
Edition: First Edition

· Category: Recently Sold ·

New York based photographer Bruce Davidson began his career as a freelance contributor for Life Magazine in the 1950’s. In Paris met Henri Cartier-Bresson, later Davidson would join him as a member of Magnum Photos. Throughout the 1960’s he helped document the civil rights movement, but it was in 1963 when he was awarded the first grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for photography that his status as a great photographer was crystallized. He spent the next several years documenting the human struggle within one city block in Upper Manhattan; East 100th street in Harlem.

He senses things others have no time or inclination to bother with, and he is driven to set down before others what he senses, by no means do these photographs take advantage… instead they show daily effort that human beings make to get by, to find food and love and yes, find a kind of meaning in the midst of ruinous social and economic circumstances.”

This copy was inscribed by Davidson to the photographer Paul Ickovic for his help and oversight in the publication process. A nice warm inscription from one esteemed photographer to another.

Description: Hard bound first printing with unclipped dust jacket. Inscribed by Bruce Davidson to the photographer Paul Ickovic on the half titlepage ” To Paul Thank you for making this book reproduction possible Bruce Davidson 79′ “. Very minor tanning to spine edge of white dust jacket, otherwise very good. A nice photographic association copy.

Bookseller Inventory # 13746

$900 

Bruce Davidson Photographs
Davidson, Bruce

ISBN: 0671400673
Publisher: Agrinde
Publication Date: 1978
Binding: Hardcover
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
Signed: Inscribed by Photographer
Edition: 1st Edition

· Category: Featured Items, Photography, Signed & Inscribed ·

Description: Hard bound in blue cloth with mylar dust jacket. (missing original dust wrapper) 136 pages. Illustrated with over 100 black & white portraits taken in rural Arkansas by the native photographer Mike Disfarmer. Born Mike Meyer he was an eccentric recluse who was taken by the idea that at birth a tornado had carried him away from his birth parents only to deposit him in Arkansas with the Meyer family. Since he was not a Meyer or a farmer, he explained, he would be a “dis” farmer, and so he legally changed his name. His work is a unique and quite remarkable set of portraits from the period. Some minor wear to boards, otherwise very good.

Bookseller Inventory # 18490

$250 

Disfarmer: The Heber Springs Portraits, 1939-1946
Scully, Julia

ISBN: 0891690034
Publisher: Addison House
Publication Date: 1976
Binding: Hard Bound
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: No Dust Jacket
Edition: First Edition

· Category: Featured Items, Photography ·

Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris on Christmas day. She emigrated to the United States to study at the Art Students League in New York. Primarily a sculptor, she has worked in many different mediums, including rubber, wood, stone, metal, and fabric. She often speaks of her work  in symbolic terms with the main focus being “relationships”. She finds inspiration from her early childhood. Her art explores the themes and paradoxes of childhood, memory, and sexuality. Her work conveys feelings of anger, betrayal and jealousy, but with feeling of playfulness. Her late work consist of very specific erotic imagery. Her most famous works are possibly the large spider structures, titled Maman. Maman now stands outside Tate Modern in London.

Description: NEW in publishers shrink wrap. 2 hard bound monographs (Echo, and Nature Study) both in publishers slipcase.

Bookseller Inventory # 17653

SOLD

Louise Bourgeois: Echo, Nature Study
Bourgeois, Louise

ISBN: 1499521812
Publisher: Cheim & Read
Publication Date: 2008
Binding: Hard Cover
Book Condition: As New
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket, As Issued

Description: Hard bound with dust jacket published on the occasion of the Tate Modern exhibition in association with Centre Pompidou, Paris. 304 pages with 150 illustrations.

Bookseller Inventory # 17655

SOLD
Louise Bourgeois
Morris, Frances

ISBN: 0847831310
Publisher: Rizzoli
Publication Date: 2008
Binding: Hard Cover
Book Condition: Near Fine
Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
Edition: First U. S. Edition

· Category: Recently Sold ·

Cy Twombly is argubly the greatest living artist of the post-Abstract Expressionist American avant-garde. His paintings have achieved auction prices well into the millions. He studied with other pioneers of the postwar American avant-garde at Black Mountain College, including Rauschenberg, Johns, Cage, Cunningham, Shaun, Chamberlain and others.

Twombly is best known for blurring the line between drawing and painting. He was one of the first American artists to interest himself in graffiti. Many of his best-known paintings of the late 1960s are reminiscent of a school blackboard, filled with scrawled gestures, as if Twombly was covering them with hundreds of years of graffiti. Twombly had at this point discarded painting figurative, representational subject-matter, citing the line or smudge–each mark with its own history

Twombly’s work is at the same time both representive of the classical, and the post modern. He is intimately interested in the classical gesture, the Roman period, the painterly. He is, at times, as much a ‘painter’ as David or Renoir, but at the same time he is fascinated with the minimal, the excluded and most importantly: the scrawled. Many of his paintings and works on paper moved into “romantic symbolism”, and their titles can be interpreted visually through shapes and forms and words. Twombly often quoted the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, as well as many classical myths and allegories in his works. In the late nineteen fifties Twombly moved to Rome and has lived and worked somewhat quietly there ever since.

Description: Hard bound with dust jacket. Published on the occasion of the September 25, 1994 exhibition. 180 pages with 187 illustrations. A nice copy, bright and clean.

Bookseller Inventory # 20125

$225

Cy Twombly: A Retrospective
Varnedoe, Kirk

ISBN: 0870706209
Publisher: Museum of Modern Art, New York
Publication Date: 1994
Binding: Hard Cover
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
Edition: First Edition

· Category: Art, Featured Items ·